Illiac I was the first
computer built and owned entirely by a university. It went on line on September
22, 1952. With the computing power of a modern-day handheld calculator, Illiac
had 2,800 vacuum tubes and weighed 10,000 pounds. It was more than 10 ft long, 2
ft high, and 8 ft high, with a 5k main memory and 64k Drum memory. The engineers
and scientists continued working on Illiac, which , and by 1956, it had more
computing power than all of the systems at Bell Labs.
Darn, I lied again. Actually, It was the IBM 604 wired program
computer:
The 604 electronic calculator, introduced in 1948, was designed primarily for
commercial
calculations.
A program:
The 604 arithmetic unit contained about 1400 electron tubes, used to
implement memory (37 decimal digits), an counter/accumulator of 13 (decimal)
positions, and control circuits. The basic operations (listed in Table 1) could
be used under control of a hard-wired program provided by the user. The
connections were made by hand on a pluggable patch panel. Maximal 60 program
steps could be wired on a single panel. For iterative procedures, a program
could be made to include loops.
It took two program panels and two passes to compute correlations........
Now you know why I am Grayhawk.